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Karoly Négyesi (chx) ousted from the Drupal community

Submitted by dryer
on Tue, 11/22/2016 - 11:15

A long standing member of the Drupal community, Karoly Négyesi AKA chx, has been expelled from the Drupal community. With a ban for both the Drupal.org website and DrupalCon events Karoly will continue to work with Drupal as a consultant, but will no longer contribute to the Open Source community efforts.

The action comes from the Drupal Community Working Group (DCWG) after numerous complaints of his behaviour as a personality to the community, ending in the final statements :

As a result, the Community Working Group has unanimously agreed to remove your [Karoly Négyesi] IRC admin privileges for Drupal-related channels. This will take effect immediately and will remain in effect indefinitely. Also, the CWG has unanimously voted to recommend to the Drupal Association that you be banned from attending future DrupalCons, including associated code sprints.

This was the reaction from Karoly on Twitter:

I will continue as a Drupal consultant but no community, no patches, no events. As I said: farewell. Thanks for the last 12.5 years.

2012-2014: Longstanding conflict between you and Daniel Kudwein (sun). sun attempted to place you on ignore and refrain from interacting with you as a form of conflict mediation, but the attacks continued. Abuse stopped when sun left the project:

It is sad to see Karoly is being expelled from the community. He has been an active member in the community of Drupal and was Instrumental in the work behind Drupal 8. He contributed heavily hands on to many core parts of Drupal, including: Form API, menu system, the Queue system, Testing module, Database abstraction layer, Twig integration and autoescape, Secure PHP storage and the migrate subsystems in Drupal 8.

The debacle overall and the reasons behind is obviously complicated. While there have been no told-you-so's and good-riddence's in the social media, some have voiced criticism against Karoly as on Reddit:

I can also say that chx has been a genuinely kind and caring person, mentoring many people in the Drupal community and helping them understand the complexities of Drupal's internals. But he has also accumulated a long list of burnt bridges that goes way past "caring about the code."

Like many Drupal old-timers, I have worked with chx and considered him a friend for many years. Over that time, chx has repeatedly flamed out, lashed out, left, returned, and been welcomed back into the community. There has never been a single "unacceptable" thing that he did; rather it is a long, long history of things that must be re-visited every time he attacks someone, they complain, and he is called out on it.

All in all, the matter is far from black and white, but seems to follow a trend of inclusivity and no-abuse. Earlier this year the Nodevember conference banned JavaScript influencer Douglas Crockford from their event. It seems as open source projects turn more mainstream and become a significant commercial effort, stewardship over community members is done and non-conforming people will be forced out. This is inline with the No Ass Holes Rule enforced at Google and other corporations.

We are now looking forward to Linus Torvalds to be shown the door from the Linux project. He has long steered it abusively and has even been identified on mass media publications as a verbally insulting jerk. Him being a white male, the epitome of exclusivity, is just the cherry on top.

Documents and discussion detailing the reasoning behind the removal if a prominent community member are available here: